Crunch talks in Athens. The IMF flying home in a huff. German ministers leaking that the eurozone can survive a Greek exit, and Greek ministers insisting that austerity can’t be tolerated any more.
If it is Wednesday, at least one of those factors must be threatening to dump Greece out of the euro EURUSD, +0.0800% by the weekend. Or Monday. Or the end of the month.
It is now five years since the Greek crisis started, and during that time it appears to have gone through as many reboots as Jurassic Park — and with a plotline that is about as familiar. The trouble is, the crisis has been so protracted, and has been through so many twists and turns, that it has become increasingly hard for even the most diligent investor to keep track of them all.
How can you tell when it is just noise, and when do you really have to start worrying about it actually happening?So how do you protect yourself from becoming exhausted by the whole saga — and work out whether this time around the talk of a Grexit might be for G-real? There will be three big clues. An acceleration of quantitative easing from the European Central Bank. An emergency-aid package being put together for Greece. And a freezing of the interbank lending market.
Until all those warning lights are flashing red all the talk of Greece coming out of the euro will be just that — talk.
The Greek debt crisis is already starting to make “Game of Thrones” look like a masterpiece of concise storytelling. It all started way back in 2009, when Greek bonds first started to spike upwards on fears that the country might not be able to pay back all the money it had borrowed in the good years.
A year after that, it already needed a bailout, and the European Union started the game of constant brinkmanship whereby Greece went to the edge of insolvency before being rescued yet again at a late-night summit. Deadlines have come and gone and crunch points have slipped by every few weeks ever since then, and yet somehow Greece still seems to be within the euro.
A succession of wise-sounding experts keep telling us it is five minutes to midnight, or even three or two minutes. But midnight never quite arrives. It is very easy for the average investor just to tune out the whole thing, and stop paying attention.
